Never Stuck for an Idea Again: The speed of an idea

Here at CAB Studios we spend a lot of time generating new ideas. Whether it’s for a new brand hook, a social media campaign or guerrilla ad, at CAB we pride ourselves on being idea machines.

We believe that a good idea can come from anybody; there’s no such thing as a bad idea.

However, coming up with the perfect idea can sometimes seem a little tricky. Sometimes we get stuck. Sometimes we spend hours dwelling on one concept while neglecting the opportunity to develop another. So, we’ve decided to live and breathe a new ideology in itself: The Speed of an Idea.

The Speed of an Idea

The Speed of an Idea is all about generating ideas quickly. It’s about not giving your brain the time to decide against it. It’s forcing your mind to build upon initial ideas and solve solutions. It’s a way of filling in the gaps and making weak ideas strong. It’s a form of thought shower, if you will.

Crazy 8’s

So how does it work? We introduce to you: Crazy 8’s. No, we don’t mean the notorious Breaking Bad meth distributor and gangster Krazy 8. We mean Crazy 8’s, the Design Sprint idea generating exercise.

Crazy 8’s is the process of folding an A4 bit of paper, (no bigger, no smaller) into 8 rectangles. Each rectangle warrants one idea, and one idea must never take longer to generate than one minute. Draw it. Write it. Do whatever you want to it but, make sure once the minute's up, you move onto the next idea. This kind of thinking and pressure forces your mind to generate, to produce. Do this in a room of 25 people, you have 200 ideas in 8 minutes. That’s pretty good going.

Stand back, choose your favourite (you only have a minute to decide, of course) and then go again. You’ve got another 8 minutes to build on that idea. Produce eight versions of the same concept, fill in the gaps, make it better.

It’s high pressure, but very rewarding and almost always produces amazing results. Crazy 8’s is something we use in our everyday work. We use it for award entries, for client briefs, for algorithm solutions and design projects. Made mainstream by Google, Crazy 8’s has become a CAB go-to... a CAB formula.

Crazy 8’s have benefited us and our clients in all sorts of ways. We’ve worked with The British Red Cross to come up with harder and faster solutions to high impact world problems. We’ve used it to develop ground breaking new app concepts and solve problems our clients didn’t even know they had.

To explore more about the Crazy 8 concept click here. Or, if you’re interested in being involved in a Design Sprint to help solve solutions with CAB Studios, head over to www.sprintvalley.com to learn about how we can use fast thinking methods and techniques to come up new ideas and brand improvements.

One Minute Briefs

Another great example of The Speed of an Idea is “One Minute Briefs”. A daily brain warm-up for one of our designers in particular, One Minute Briefs (OMBs) is a innovative Twitter community. With a following of 15k, OMBs announce a random brief every day. The aim of the game? To come up with a clever and intuitive answer to the brief in just one minute. The briefs aren’t your conventional briefs. They’re to the point. For example ‘Advertise: National Kiss a Ginger Day’, ‘Advertise: Skateboards’ or ‘Advertise: Braille’. OMBs invites its vast following (also known as OMBLES) to take to Twitter to answer these short briefs in a bid to be crowned winner of the best idea. OMBs as a concept encourages imperfection, it encourages conceptual thinking and big ideas in a small space of time.

CAB Designer, Tommy Mason's, OMB for 'Braille'.

CAB Designer, Tommy Mason's, OMB for 'Skateboards'.

CAB Designer, Tommy Mason's, OMB for 'National Ginger Day'.

A supportive online community, OMBs are not only a great way to get your work out there, but also a fun way to make new connections within the industry. Often, brands will get involved by setting their product or brand name as the brief of the day as a way of generating hundreds of ideas in under a minute. It’s a great example of using social media, to be social.

Want to explore more of OMB and get involved with fast thinking? Follow them on Twitter here.

So, the next time you’re struggling with a new idea, grab a bit of A4… you know what to do. (Or give us a call and our creative team of 25 will give it a shot for you!).